[spectre] New Issue of Culture Machine: Aesthetics of Biomachines

[Gary Hall]

//

*/Culture Machine/*is pleased to announce /Vol 24 The Aesthetics of 
Biomachines/,

guest-edited by Johan Lau Munkholm, Naja Grundtmann, Kristin Veel and 
Kathrin Maurer, from Copenhagen University and the University of 
Southern Denmark

Link: https://culturemachine.net/archives/aesthetics-of-biomachines/

*From the Guest-Editor’s Introduction:*

This special issue of /Culture Machine/ on biomachines seeks to expand 
our understanding of the current state of the interactions between the 
biological and the machinic through an aesthetic lens. The notion of 
‘aesthetics’ as regards biomachines invokes multiple instigations of the 
term. We employ it to refer to 1) the study of sensory knowledge, as 
defined in the work of Baumgarten, and 2) the philosophical branch that 
studies art and its interpretation. Ascribing aesthetic properties to 
biomachines allows us to home in on the particulars of the 
techno-sensory experiences at work in their contemporary configurations. 
The articles in this issue describe the constitution and implication of 
the meeting between the biological and the machinic in differing ways. 
While some contributors identify in the encounter composite forms that 
confuse the distinction between biology and machine, others focus on how 
computational mediation encloses biological processes for instrumental 
reasons while (intentionally or not) producing new forms of knowledge 
and affective entanglements. In other contributions, the transformative 
potentials that emerge in the meeting between humans and machines are 
assessed according to the power relations they construct, reproduce or 
challenge. It is common to all the contributions, however, that the 
terms and the constitution of relationality of /bios /and machine are a 
basic topic of enquiry that opens multiple affiliated questions and 
problems that sharpen our critical sense of our developing technological 
reality. Equally common to the contributions is a fundamental concern 
with aesthetics. In employing aesthetics as an approach or a practice 
that gives room to notions of the machinic outside its immediate 
instrumental context, the issue offers studies of biomachines that allow 
us to appreciate our new technological realities.

Contents

Artificial Touch in Contemporary Art and Culture 
<https://culturemachine.net/?p=8483>
*Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen & Lea Laura N. Michelsen*

Of Grafts, Interferences and Haploids: Speculative Reproduction and 
Biomachinic Time in Naomi Mitchison’s /Memoirs of a Spacewoman/ 
<https://culturemachine.net/?p=8504>
*Henriette Steiner & Kristin Veel*

AI Uncanny: Posthuman Entanglement and Biomachine Ethics in /The Trouble 
with Being Born/ <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8509>
*Annie Ring*

Contagious Life: Clones, Deadbots, Digital Twins 
<https://culturemachine.net/?p=8517>
*Caroline Bassett*

More Than an Optimisation Problem: AI Incommensurability as 
Companionable Aesthetics <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8522>
*Nicole De Brabandere*

Bio-AI: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Data Animism 
<https://culturemachine.net/?p=8527>
*Joanna Zylinska*

Pierre Huyghe’s Art, Bio-Machines, and the Question of Life 
<https://culturemachine.net/?p=8532>
*Kathrin Maurer*

Encountering the Biomachinic Planet <https://culturemachine.net/?p=8537>
*Thomas Storey*




-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org 
Blog:http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

Latest:

Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Journal issue: Ecologies of Dissemination issue of PARSE Journal #21 - Summer 2025, edited by Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting:https://parsejournal.com/journal/#ecologies-of-dissemination. (I'm one of the contributors to this experimental issue which emphasizes collective over individual authorship.)

Video: 'Liquidate AI Art', Computer Arts Society:https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2025/october/webinar-liquidate-ai-art

Talk: 'The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead Internet':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html




















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